I was late to the Patti Smith train. I finally read her first memoir, Just Kids, in the summer of 2024, after having seen it displayed in every bookstore, on every Goodreads list, in the Instagram story of every interesting person I had ever met. However, at the time I knew Patti Smith only by name and songs heard in passing, so I went into Just Kids virtually blind. It hit me like a suckerpunch.

Just Kids opens with a death, before immediately jumping back decades to Patti Smith’s childhood. She breezes over her years spent in New Jersey, interweaving her narrative with details of Robert Mapplethorpe’s youth, before recounting her move to New York City at 20 years old armed with nothing but clothes, a notebook, and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. From that point, the book becomes a story about artists trying to make it, and through Smith’s words, we uncover her love for Mapplethorpe and fall in love with him along with her. As their relationship has its ups and downs, particularly as Robert Mapplethorpe explores his attraction to men, he remains a constant presence in her life, and the care between them only strengthens. 

As much as it is a pseudo-love story between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids is also a love letter to the time period. Smith paints a vivid picture of New York City in the 1970s and transports the reader to the streets of Manhattan. We attend concerts at her side, we meet Bobby Neuwirth and Janis Joplin, we witness Robert Mapplethorpe’s entrance into the art scene from its very start. The memoir captures you and traps you in a time and place that will never exist again.

The last section of the book, titled “Holding Hands with God,” is nothing short of heartbreaking. Robert Mapplethorpe is diagnosed with AIDS and the rest of the narrative is like a ticking bomb. With 20 pages left, the end is near and sadness seeps through every line. After having guided us through their meeting, Smith recounts her and Mapplethorpe’s lasts, followed by photographs, lines of poetry, and a promise to share her and Mapplethorpe’s story.  

Patti Smith’s second memoir, M Train, is also tinted by grief. This time, a much older Smith writes about her life and travels, darkened by the loss of her husband Fred. Whereas Just Kids is passionate and exciting, M Train is quiet and melancholic. Much of the narration takes place in cafés, alongside a notebook and a black coffee, the same routine whether in New York, Paris, or Mexico. Although Smith brings us around the world with her, as she attends lectures and visits historic sites, it always comes back to her cats, Fred, and her Rockaway Beach house, which she dubs her Alamo. 

The tone of M Train is marked by dozens of Patti Smith’s black-and-white photographs, depicting the places she visits and the everyday objects that catch her attention. In Just Kids, the photographs were primarily of herself and Mapplethorpe. This time, the sign of an arcade bar in Detroit, Michigan, Frida Kahlo’s bed, Sylvia Plath’s grave, or the occasional candid photograph of Fred. It seems that, with age, Smith’s priorities have shifted, and her storytelling has shifted along with it. 

As a writer myself, what stood out to me the most about M Train is the fact that, if you look beyond the black coffees and the traveling and the pilgrimages and the grief, it is at its core a book about writing. The opening line states that “it’s not so easy writing about nothing,” the book ends with the knowledge that Smith will soon begin to write something new. This book is a quiet one precisely because she succeeds in writing about the ‘nothings’ of her life. Every cup of coffee, every episode of her favorite detective show, every dream she recounts, all contribute to the tapestry of nothingness that constitutes her daily life, but she describes it with such sensory richness that I remained hooked to every word. Her passion for writing is present throughout each scene, a passion that she explicitly states in her book Devotion when asking “why do we write?” before answering that it’s “because we cannot simply live.”

The power in Patti Smith’s memoirs relies on the love that exists in every word: love for Robert Mapplethorpe and Fred Smith, love for music and New York City, love for her siblings and her children, love for literature and writing, love for travel and love for the world. Through this love, she seamlessly weaves memories and moments together to give the reader a glimpse into her mind, her art, and her writing. 

Image Credit: Micah Petyt